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Converting to HTTPS

I have a 10 yr old website that we are just now adding a Symantec SSL with Extended Validation. I've seen some older posts about whether switching to URL's to HTTP effects Google ranking and I understand it may in the short run, but I wondered if anyone had any updated info about how best to go about this. Are there any step by step articles that could walk me through this?

Our certificate is already installed now, but we haven't forced it out there yet. If I understand right, we will use the HTTPS on the entire site. I am not very experienced with 301's, but I believe I can set this up in Godaddy.com where our domain is reigstered so that our old HTTP forwards to HTTPS. Also, I don't think this effects anything within GWT so I don't think I have to make any changes there.

Am I missing anything?

FYI, the prices for this on the Symantec site are pretty high for a small business like ours. I looked around and found https://www.thesslstore.com/, an SSL reseller, had cheaper prices listed on their site. As it turns out, I called to ask a technical question and the sales person offered to email me a custom quote that was even cheaper than what was listed on their site. So if you are dealing with a limited budget, I might recommend you call The SSL Store and get a quote from them. I am not an affiliate and having nothing to do with them, I was just happy with their service and I believe it cost me about 1/2 of the price on the Symantec site. Hope that helps someone.

1 Response

When we moved our site over to full HTTPS we noticed that GWMT needed to re-authenticate for the HTTPS domain, and actually shows different information from the HTTPS profile compared to the HTTP profile.

The Analytics proporty won't change, but your sitemap will need an update for provide the HTTPS links compared to the HTTP ones. Google will quickly pick-up the protocol change and as long as you set-up correct redirects from HTTP to HTTPS you won't be dropping traffic that much. In the long run you'll see your site returning to it's old self again, depending on how good the rest of your optimization is.

Do keep in mind that if you're mixing content (retrieving external content from HTTP sources) some browsers start throwing warnings to users; if you're embedding HTTP content in an HTTPS site, browsers like Chrome don't load the HTTP at all unless the user clicks the option for mixed content at the end of the address bar.

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